EXTRA: The Burnham reshuffle

Lots of good news and one very bleak bit of bad news.

Slightly mad set of Cabinet appointments on the first day of Andy Burnham’s government. The news dribbled in over the afternoon and evening: Ed Miliband to the Foreign Office, Yvette Cooper to health, Angela Rayner to housing, Lucy Powell to education, Jonathan Reynolds to business, John Healey to the Treasury.

That final appointment is canny and appealing: a smart, unshowy operator, who can work well with a prime minister, with a strong track record on defence and housing - two key areas where the Treasury will need to unlock funds. It was also utterly discombobulating to the lobby, wrong-footing countless journalists who all assumed we knew who was destined for the role. Until this afternoon I’d have said there was no doubt about this appointment. Governments kill rumours they do not like. The fact it was such a shock really made it feel like we were in a new era where the old rules did not apply.

It came at the end of a sunny, encouraging day. Burnham announced that his first instruction as prime minister would be to end homelessness. It was pleasing to hear someone talk about instructions rather than missions or aims. It had the ring of concrete action rather than vague managerial aspiration. It was reassuring that it was singular rather than plural and that it was morally meaningful - homelessness is a tragedy for those who experience it but also a broader sign of national decline for those who encounter it. It is also deliverable. Homelessness was basically eradicated under New Labour as a result of the work of the homelessness unit. It can be done again, if it is approached with seriousness.

All good vibes, with fresh hope, as we basked in the summer’s warmth. But then there was that one nasty cloud. No.10 announced that Shabana Mahmood would remain as home secretary.

It was a travesty. She is literally the last person I would have kept in post and yet she seems to be the only person to have remained in their position. It raised serious questions about Burnham’s judgement.

She is an anti-immigration ideologue when we urgently need decent-minded, level-headed people to take the poison out of this issue. She engages in a performative form of cruelty which robs immigrants of their dignity, delegitimises those who defend them, validates the far-right and damages our reputation as a country. Her policies are shallow, unworkable and economically harmful. And her spat with Home Office minister Mike Tapp recently showed that, even on a basic managerial level, she cannot competently not run her department.

The decision to keep her is, at best, weakness in the face of the anti-immigrant right and at worst an active endorsement of her behaviour in the Home Office. It suggests Burnham will continue to lose votes to the Greens, when he has only just learned in Makerfield what can be accomplished if you unite progressive voters. It is electorally, economically, politically and morally foolhardy.

However, it’s worth keeping this in context. It’s not good, but it need not be a complete disaster.

Mahmood ran rampant under Keir Starmer because his administration decided that it needed to wake up every day and punch liberals in the face. This was a specific strategy and it was eagerly, even gleefully, pursued - for instance in her repeated attacks on “white liberals”, a weird Bizarro form of racialised anti-immigration rhetoric.

Burnham’s administration is likely to be very different. Punching liberals is not his strategy and it does not reflect his temperament.

The new prime minister is perhaps best understood as a product of the Labour party. Unlike the Corbynites, who despised the centre and right of the party, or the Starmerites who despised the left and liberals in the party, he wants a place for everyone. This suggests he will keep a sceptical view on immigration, but not seek to alienate and needlessly offend liberals. Basically park it as an issue rather than pursue it. You’ll notice that he did not mention immigration once in his speech outside Downing Street today.

He is serious when he said that he wants to replace “point-scoring” with “problem solving”. He is serious when he says that he wants a more collegiate, workmanlike culture in parliament. This strongly suggests that he wants to find compromise positions between the Mahmood approach on the right and the soft-left opposition to her plans, particularly on changes to indefinite leave to remain.

This policy is currently in a disastrous state. It would throw out thousands of care workers, give children of immigrants national status on the basis of their parent’s wealth, and prevent many people who arrive here from ever integrating. Burnham wants it watered down.

This is what he told Radio 4:

“I do have a concern about leaving people without the ability to settle, one of the concerns being that if there’s a need to constantly check up on the status of countries where people have come from, that might limit the ability of the Home Office to deal with the backlog. And it also may leave people in a sense of limbo and unable to integrate. I’m not going to say that the home secretary is wrong to call for this level of change...What I would say is it’s really important, on the back of the measures that she’s announced, that there is a considered debate, time is taken to see if consensus can be built around it. Because that would be hugely valuable to the country if that could be secured.”

You can hear something similar in his ITV interview in December on rough sleeping targets, where he focuses on the brutal and self-harming process whereby those granted refugee status are thrown into homelessness due to the speed by which their accommodation is taken away.

“The task that we have faced has not been made any easier by the actions of the Home Office in recent times, evicting people with very, very short notice… People who’ve been given status but are then just literally evicted the next day and unsurprisingly haven’t got anywhere to go. It does feel to me as I kind of look back on my old workplace, Westminster…. what I’ve seen in my role when those decisions are taken, it just builds the number of families who present as homeless.”

It’s likely that Burnham’s homelessness pledge - his first as prime minister - will therefore take into account the way anti-refugee policy has distorted homelessness numbers. And that suggests someone who is alive to the weird self-harming manner in which this issue can damage other parts of the government agenda.

Burnham was never going to be an all-singing-all-dancing pro-immigration prime minister. He has stated clearly that he wants a firm policy. That left us with two possible outcomes, which we should carefully distinguish from each other.

One, he does what Starmer did - fresh new draconian policies every day, lurid headlines, vitriolic briefings, all of that. You lose progressive voters, you lose your moral standing, you lose the unity of the parliamentary Labour party. Maybe he’s into that but there is nothing to suggest it and everything to suggests otherwise.

Two, he uses what’s been done already to park the issue, let the old Starmer administration have played the bad cop, plays the good cop, and then rather cynically lays claim to the lower immigration numbers for this year. This remains the most probable outcome. It means that those who support immigrants and want them to be treated with dignity have the strength to affect change if they are sensible about the way they lobby Labour MPs.

The Mahmood re-appointment is obviously terrible. It is a big loud warning sign flashing above this project. But the most realistic interpretation is not that Burnham will pursue the ‘fuck-liberals’ agenda. That runs contrary to nearly everything we know about him. It is that he thinks Mahmood has become talismanic of Labour’s reliability on immigration to more socially conservative voters and must therefore be retained, but that her proposals should be softened and moderated.

The key test will come when we see what comes of those indefinite leave to remain plans. Then we’ll have a better indication of his approach to this issue. In the meantime, we’re left with beautiful rays of sunshine - and that one troubling cloud on the horizon.